Energy Bill

Nuclear has been around for 50 or 60 years, so there have been plenty of opportunities to find a satisfactory, affordable and workable solution but as far as I know, no place in the world has succeeded in doing so. The Americans intended to put their waste under Yucca mountain, but they are withdrawing from that proposal. There is great uncertainty and a real problem. The Government's case does not stand up to examination for the reasons that I have given, but there is one other consideration that fundamentally alters the energy equation. As has been said, tomorrow the EU will announce mandatory targets for each EU country, so that we can achieve an overall target of 20 per cent. of EU energy coming from renewable sources by 2020. We do not know the UK target but it is widely predicted that it will be 15 per cent. The crucial point is that we are talking about not just electricity generation but fuel for transport and heating. The contribution that renewables make to transport fuel is next to nothing, and their contribution to heating is relatively small, at least at the moment. The implication is surely that the UK will be required to generate 30 to 40 per cent. of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. That is an eightfold increase. That means delivering on the promise to provide 33 GW from offshore wind power—a promise that I was pleased to hear my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State make recently—as well as kick-starting a range of measures. There is not one simple panacea. There is a range of technologies, including renewable and decentralised technologies, in which Britain can lead the world; I am thinking particularly of wave and tidal power. Meeting the targets means building power stations that use combined heat and power, and which achieve an efficiency of 90 per cent. plus, as has been done in Scandinavia. It means being able to burn cleaner fuels such as biomass, as well as fossil fuels. It means switching from the renewables obligation certificate system to feed-in tariffs that give fixed prices, not variable support—a point on which I agree with the Opposition spokesman. Such tariffs have proved massively successful in Germany. There must also be an enormous improvement in energy efficiency. If we do all those things, we will not need any nuclear power stations, but the crucial point is that we have to do those things if we are to meet the mandatory targets. The irony of this debate is that even if the Bill receives its Second Reading tonight, it will have to be subject to major revisions tomorrow, when the—